1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal device having an element substrate and an opposed substrate bonded to each other with a sealing material and an electric apparatus having the liquid crystal device.
2. Related Art
As shown in FIG. 9A, a liquid crystal device includes an element substrate 10 and an opposed substrate bonded to each other with an annular sealing material 80. The element substrate 10 includes a plurality of pixel electrodes 9a on one surface of an element-substrate-side substrate body 10d. The opposed substrate 20 includes a common electrode 21 on one surface of an opposed-substrate-side substrate body 20d. The sealing material 80 includes a bead-type or fiber-type gap material 81 for controlling a distance between the element substrate 10 and the opposed substrate 20. Therefore, a predetermined gap G is secured between the element substrate 10 and the opposed substrate 20, and a liquid crystal layer 50 is arranged in the gap G. The one surface of the element-substrate-side substrate body 10d and the one surface of the opposed-substrate-side substrate body 20d both are flat entirely including an area overlapped with the sealing material 80 and an area surrounded by the sealing material 80. Therefore, the thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 is controlled to a predetermined value according to the size of the gap material 81 (See JP-A-2003-303428).
In the liquid crystal device, in order to improve a response of the liquid crystal layer 50, the layer thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 is preferably reduced. However, in order to reduce the layer thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 to, for example, approximately 1.8 μm in the liquid crystal device shown in FIG. 9A, it is necessary to use a gap material having an outer diameter of 1.9 μm, which is smaller than those in the related art, as the gap material 81 as shown in FIG. 9B. However, reduction of the outer diameter of the gap material 81 to a level smaller than 2.0 μm is difficult because of constraints in terms of manufacture. Therefore, there is a problem that it is difficult to reduce the layer thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 to a level smaller than 1.9 μm.
In particular, in the case of a reflective-type liquid crystal device, reduction of the layer thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 is required in order to provide brightness equivalent to that of a transmissive-type liquid crystal device. In other words, in the case of the reflective-type liquid crystal device, light passes through the liquid crystal layer 50 twice. Therefore, in order to obtain the equivalent brightness by securing the same optical path length as the transmissive liquid crystal device, the layer thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 is required to be reduced to approximately half the thickness of the transmissive liquid crystal device. In this case as well, there is a problem that reduction of the outer diameter of the gap material 81 is difficult and hence reduction of the layer thickness of the liquid crystal layer 50 is difficult.